Another hacker in the group, a brawny coder named Michael Granger, served
in Operation Desert Storm. After the war was over, he slept under a bridge
for nine months because he couldn't reconcile the fears he'd felt out in
the desert with getting an apartment and a job. Before he became a programmer,
he wrote poetry. I asked him if he missed it. "I feel that there is a muse,
and what she wants is for me to be creative," he replied. "She doesn't
care if I'm writing poetry or code."

Strictly speaking, the core of Perl is a chunk of classified spookware
that belongs to the United States government.

In 1986, Larry Wall was working for a subsidiary of Burroughs on a project
codenamed Blacker. The client was the National Security Agency. One aim
was to develop what are called multilevel secure wide-area networks. Larry
was in charge of an installation in California that consisted of three
VAX machines and three Suns linked over an encrypted line to a similar
array in Pennsylvania. His supervisor asked him to develop a program that
would enable him to configure the machines on both coasts, while generating
reports about these interactions. He was given a month to come up with
something.

These guys live in the trenches of the open source wars. On weekends, they relax by jamming on software projects of their own.

Larry has written that three attributes of the typical hacker are "laziness,
impatience, and hubris"; it went against his grain to spend a month coding
a widget that could be used for only one task. So he crafted Perl, a tool
that would work in a diverse range of programming situations, and then
he pocketed a tape containing the source code for his invention.

By the time he created Perl, Larry was already a hacker of considerable
renown. In 1984, he wrote his first widely adopted software tool, a reader
for Usenet news called rn, one of the first programs that let people follow
newsgroup discussions by topic - siphoning a river into drinkable streams.
His other early triumph was called patch. A masterpiece of practical thinking
and elegant coding, patch made it possible for hackers to distribute upgraded
versions of their code without having to upload and download entire programs,
by keeping track of the changes that had been made in a piece of software.
It transformed the nature of collaborative programming, becoming a cornerstone
of what Eric Raymond, in his seminal open source essay "The Cathedral and
the Bazaar," called the "bazaar" model of software development.

Both rn and patch embodied the spirit of Unix hackerdom, which was an open
source culture before the term open source was invented.
If you wrote a powerful piece of code, it was like a scientific discovery,
and you wanted to share it. The highest form
of hacker praise was that a tool you made would be put to work all over
the place.

"Perl" is usually glossed as "Practical Extraction and Report Language,"
and occasionally as "Pathetically Eclectic Rubbish Lister." Both are retronyms.
Originally, Larry wanted to name his new language Pearl, a word with positive
connotations. Larry considers himself as much a linguist as a hacker. He's
also a fan of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings . There are doorways
into Tolkien's imagination built right into the core of Perl. Each section
of the source code begins with a quote from the Rings trilogy
- say, "A fair jaw-cracker dwarf language must be." If you understand
the epigram, you comprehend what that section is designed to do. Larry
wanted to give Perl a name that suggested that it was worth treasuring.

Furthermore, Larry is a devout Christian
- he's the son of a fundamentalist Mennonite preacher from a long line
of preachers. In the 13th book of Matthew, Jesus tells the parable of a
merchant "seeking goodly pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great
price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it" - "it" being the Kingdom
of Heaven. But there was already another programming language called Pearl.
So Larry - whose personal motto, which has become the mantra of the Perl
community, is "There's more than one way to do it" - christened his new
creation Perl.

Though Perl doesn't get the media attention that is lavished on Java, software
written in the language is embedded throughout many tools and networks
that we use every day, quietly executing critical functions. Hassan Schroeder's
duct tape metaphor is apt, because Perl is most at home in the interstices
of other programs and systems
- say, passing data between databases and Web pages. The first interactive
sites on the Web employed a Perl module called CGI.pm, which was written
by Lincoln Stein, one of the instructors aboard the Volendam .

One testament to Perl's broad usefulness was the diversity of the programmers
on the boat. In an article written for The Perl Journal,
Lincoln, a bioinformatics researcher, detailed how Perl "saved" the Human
Genome Project from a database crisis at labs in England and the US. Monjay
Settro of cbs.com told me her site's entire production cycle has been retooled
in Perl. Dick Hardt runs a thriving software business called ActiveState
at the crossroads of the Perl and Windows worlds. Elizabeth Mattijsen and
Wendy van Dijk used Perl and other open source software to build the first
Web-hosting provider in the Netherlands. A Minnesota gadgeteer named Bruce
Winter wrote a program called MisterHouse that allows him to pick up the
phone in his kitchen and ask for the outside temperature, have his email
read to him, or request that the bedroom curtains be shut.

Perl is especially adept at working with text. The Pontifex encryption
software in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon was written
in it. This facility with words makes Perl as useful for spammers as for
Amazon.com. Among hackers, Perl's most prized virtue is what Larry once
called its whipupitude : It's particularly handy for whipping
up potent little programs in a hurry. As a result, Perl has become the
Swiss Army chain saw of overworked systems administrators everywhere.

After Larry created Perl, he gave it away, distributing the source code
on the Net. It
is upgraded, ported into all the major OS environments, and promoted by
an army of volunteers - the Perl 5 Porters and Perl Mongers who hold regular
meetings in most major cities. Part of the reason there's so little hype
about it is that, unlike Java, Perl has never had a Sun shining behind
it with a corporate PR machine ensuring that every tech-mag stringer heard
it was the next big thing. While Linux is the golden boy of the open source
movement, proving that a loose confederation of hackers jamming outside
the domain of commerce could code their own bitchin' OS, Perl is the quietly
pervasive open source success story.